The historian David Starkey has lambasted the BBC over the swashbuckling dramatisation The Tudors, saying the corporation should be ashamed of the series, which features the increasingly bloated Henry VIII played by the lissom Irish actor Jonathan Rhys Meyers, usually half naked and tumbling into bed with some woman auditioning to become one of the six wives.

"The Tudors is terrible history with no point," Starkey said at the Cheltenham literature festival. "It's wrong for no purpose. I've got no problem with getting history wrong for a purpose - Shakespeare often got things wrong for a reason. But it's the randomised arrogance of ignorance of The Tudors. Shame on the BBC for producing it."

In fact, the BBC did not produce the series but bought it in. A spokeswoman said yesterday: "The Tudors is not a drama-documentary, which has always been made clear, but a highly authored and entertaining interpretation of events in a period in history."

The second series has just ended on the BBC, with Henry halfway through the wives, having got rid of Anne Boleyn. Historically, the king should be in his 40s and already putting on the enormous bulk of his later life, but the actor playing him is still slender as a blade of grass, reportedly to increase the box office appeal of the series.

The drama has attracted a steady audience of about 2.3 million viewers - rather less than some of Starkey's own documentaries, including Henry and His Wives, and another on the history of the monarchy whose ratings thrashed the then hit soap opera Ally McBeal. The first series attracted 3.2 million viewers.

The Tudors is an independent co-production between Peace Arch, Showtime and Working Title, and is filmed in Ireland. Starkey, though a serious academic, has also cheerfully described himself as "an all-purpose media tart", and relishes controversy.

When he was described as "the rudest man in Britain" for his acid tongue on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, he gleefully calculated that the title added at least £100,000 a year to his earnings.